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The internet was nearly broken in half last night when news broke that Ben Affleck, a man proven to be capable of completely ruining a superhero franchise with just one movie, was cast as Batman in the upcoming blockbuster, Superman vs. Batman, which will hit theaters in Summer, 2015. The casting is inexplicably stupid, even for Warner Bros., parent company of DC Comics. But it is so stupid that it constitutes evidence of a tear in the fabric of time itself? One top scientist says: yes!

"Ben Affleck is the last actor one would ever expect to be cast as Batman," explained Professor Thaddeus Puffinbottoms, a comic book industry astrophysicist at the prestigious DeVry University in New Jersey. "Out of all the better and more obvious choices, why him?

"Well, the simplest answer is usually the correct one," he answered. "Warner Bros. did try to cast every other actor still alive as Batman before casting Affleck. Just not in this universe."

What? Is Puffinbottoms trying to tell us that we are living in some kind apocalyptic alternate timeline?

"Quantum science tells us that there are are infinite number of alternate universes in which every possible thing that can happen has happened," he went on. "And if that's true, what are the odds that we exist in the primary universe? Well, they're infinity to one."

But we could be the prime universe, right?

"We like to think of ourselves as the 'prime' universe," Puffinbottoms went on. "the one from which all other possible realities diverge. But in the 'prime' universe, obviously, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Batman. I mean, that's a no brainer."

It seems like a crazy idea, and to be honest we've never really checked out Puffinbottoms' credentials, but the evidence is all over the place. There's the Affleck casting, of course. There's the weekly ridiculous fuckups that lead to resetting the Has DC Done Something Stupid Today counter. Earlier this week, people actually engaged in a civil debate on the internet over a controversial topic. Lobo was rebooted as an emo waif! Justice League of America was replaced with Justice League Canada! What kind of fucked up, going back in time and making a clone of yourself that bangs your mother and thus becomes your own grandfather type of butterfly effect could have caused such a serious breakage of the spacetime continuum?!

"Some of the top minds in comic book industry science are looking into this," Puffinbottoms told us. "It's too early to tell, but we think it may go all the way back to the announcement of Before Watchmen. Think about it. Prior to that, would you ever have believed that DC Comics would release kitchen appliances branded with the Watchmen logo? It would be completely absurd. But that happened, and thousands of highly improbable things have happened since."

So is there anyway to bring things back to normal? Can we fix the timestream and go back to the way things were?! Maybe if we can somehow travel to the original timeline and...

"We tried to make contact with Earth Prime," he shrugged, "but it turns out that President Sarah Palin banned all government funded research in the field of interdimensional travel when she took office there in 2008, so it's a dead end."

On second thought, we think we like it better here. See you at the casino!